I neglect my wife. There. I said it. The cat’s out the bag.

I spend a lot of my free time upstairs in our craft room, sewing skirts and dresses and what-have-yous for our daughter. But nothing, alas, for my wife. I am a sorry excuse for a husband.

That all changes right now.

A friend took me to SCRAP, a San Francisco re-use warehouse filled with castoff knick-knacks and craft supplies, and I stumbled upon entire rows of file cabinets just brimming with old-school clothes patterns. Determined to make something for Dana, I picked up a few patterns with her in mind and knew deep down … she is going to be thrilled. With our anniversary approaching, I now have just the thing.

Because who doesn’t need a pair of casual Hammer Pants after a long day at the office?

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And speaking of the office, I think she’ll definitely look the part of the hard-charging executive in these lines. Watch our Gordon Gecko! Greige? Is good.

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Can’t you just hear Dana thanking me right now? Yeah, me too.

There were also some wonderful patterns for Emmeline. Still in the midst of her Little House on the Prairie fixation, she has requested nightgowns that reach the floor:

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And dresses that look like something Mary — the blind one — put together:

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But you know, she’s not going to be young forever. One day, I fear, she’ll look at all the things her mother and I make for her and hold up her nose. “Please,” I imagine her saying, using a hand to block the view of some new, freshly crafted adorable dress while heading out the door for the Gap or Urban Outfitters.

“Teenagers,” Dana will sigh, shaking her head, “But thank god you picked up that pattern so many years ago. She’s going to be so popular!”

(I love that it says “Made in Heaven,” because I have to wonder: Whose vision of heaven looks like that? Incidentally, this pattern was made in 1991, and I could have sworn I saw Brenda Walsh wear a top almost exactly like it. And don’t even get me started on Blossom. Man, were we cool or what?)

I’ve been having way too much fun with the Hipstamatic iPhone app, which produces the same kind of gritty, cracked, sepia-tinged photos you can get with “through the lens” photography, but for only $2.

All these faded pictures of San Francisco, they call to mind a lost city, a city painted in rose and perseverance — a romantic, tenacious rotogravure where Dashiell Hammett still overlooks Pine Street, Dirty Harry still stalks the Palace of Fine Arts and Herb Caen still takes constitutionals around Telegraph Hill, watching the fog curl under the Golden Gate Bridge and twist in eerie tendrils around Coit Tower.

The photo results remind me of those old pictures you dig out of your parents’ photo albums — time frozen, yellowed with age. There’s your dad, standing with a beer in his hand, his shirt off and his chest wet from yard labor. He has muscles. He looks so young. But why are his shorts so ungodly short? And when did your parents ever look so young and full of vigor anyway? In those aged, yellowed photos, a time stamp scrawled in robot-movie red across the bottom, you can find the answer. Twenty years before you were born.

And here’s a different photo, obviously taken from a different camera. Instead of yellow, the image is green, as if a gel was placed over the lens, offering an aura of peppermint to time. There’s your mom. She’s smiling. There’s a kid in her lap, a newborn with his eyes closed. With one hand your mom shows off the baby and with the other she holds up the neat bob falling in a shiny helmet off her head, as if to say life is full of miracles and contains multitudes: babies and hair-dos in one peppermint-scented moment in time. Life is good.

No matter how much you tinker with the different settings of this photo application, you can never exactly replicate a shot. The flash pops differently. The “film” cracks. You can put gels over the flash bulb or change out a lens. I’ve been taking photos for years and on a good day I am, at best, a mediocre photographer. I don’t have an eye and rarely remember the technical aspects that can turn the ordinary into art. So I’m dumbstruck to find the pocket technology I secretly hate — do you really need to check your email while on a date? Or driving? Or having coffee with a friend? — at the same time allows me to pretend to artistic talent. Life is good. And contains multitudes.

California Street, Cable Car

Ferry Building

OMG! An elevator!

Painted Ladies

I used to tell my daughter that King Kong lives at the top of this thing, and now she’s old enough to hound me for proof.

I cropped out Tim Burton’s latest to give it a more old-timey feel. I bet you could shoot this during the Film Noir fest and be really happy with the results.

Dolores Park and the city skyline.

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Welcome!

You can see a lot more vintage-ish photos over at the photo page, including more views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, cable cars, Union Square, Crissy Field, cityscapes, cool buildings and a lot more, including our burgeoning pirate army.

You can hear my NPR stories here or read my essays here, including the one about my bleeding penis. Or you can just take a look at Michael Jackson and Bubbles, the Laocoon’s unit and the Dukes of Hazzard outfit I found at a thrift store. Up to you. Enjoy. And thanks for stopping in.

I slept on it, dreamed on it, closed my eyes and wished for Christmas morning on it. Passed down from my grandparents, it was one of a pair — both chestnut colored with short, rounded posts and sculpted head boards. My brother Jeff slept on the other bed, a narrow passageway between us.

Each night when we turned off the lights, we took turns using our knuckles on the headboards, gently pounding out TV show openings and commercial jingles. The Brady Bunch was always the easiest to guess, followed by The Jeffersons. By the time we got to Happy Days, my eyelids grew heavy and the sound of gentle pounding faded into darkness.

I spent long sick days on that bed, sniffling under the seasonal bed-in-a-bag ensemble I demanded from Mervyns. In the dark hours of the night when I thought Jeff was sleeping, I learned to kiss Kelly Artim in the bed, wrapping my arms around her just like in the movies.

Disturbed by the noises one night, Jeff propped himself on his elbow and peered through the dark, asking, “What the fuck are you doing?”

I hoped it was too dark for him to see, as I hurriedly pulled the stuffed bear’s fur from my tongue.

“Thleeping, why do you askth?”

I was mortified in that bed.

When Jeff got his own room, I got my own TV and Nintendo, which I thought was a fantastic trade, until the first night I turned out the lights and started gently knocking on the headboard, realizing the other bed had been moved out of the room and there was no one there to knock back. The room was deafeningly quiet. I felt lonely in that bed.

They say we spend a third of our lives sleeping, the “chief nourisher in life’s feast,” as Macbeth might say in one of those late-night commercial jingles, maybe for Sleep Train or Tempur-Pedic.

But I didn’t realize how many memories I had of my first “big boy” bed until I started restoring a hand-me-down bunk bed for Emmeline. First slept in by her grandmother so many centuries ago, the bed was brown and cracked, fashioned in a western theme, complete with a wagon train drawing on the headboard. It was the kind of bed you might find on Curly Washburn’s dude ranch and just as rickety.

Dana inherited the bed when she was the same age as Emme is now — 3 and a half. The bed is not high — the top bunk comes up to your shoulder. So I can see why her parents never installed a guardrail. And yet, at the same time, Dana was only 3 and a half, so I can see how she’d fallen out one night, crashing to the floor and splintering her collarbone on the carpet. When we took ownership of the bed, I found drill holes on the sides where her dad had constructed a makeshift guardrail after “the incident.”

Dana didn’t remember the western theme or the drawing of a wagon train on the headboard, so she wasn’t against sanding the whole thing down and painting it glossy white in accordance with Emme’s desire to have a “white and pink fairy rainbow bed.” We tried to find one of those in the stores, but quickly discovered that many children’s bunk beds sold for as much as $3,000.

No thank you.

Maybe it was the paint fumes — a noxious cloud of chemically white from the 50 spray cans I went through over the course of a month — but with each day of working on it, some new memory of my own childhood bed would emerge, and I’d grow impossibly excited about the idea that Emme would remember this new bed. Her crib and its toddler-sized conversion would probably be lost to the vagaries of time and memory, but this bed, she would sleep in it for years to come and would remember, maybe, what it was like to build a fort in the bottom bunk or curl up with dad to read a book on the top bunk. She would remember sleepovers, some friend or annoying younger sibling whispering from below. She would remember sick days and embarrassments. She would, I realized, spend an enormous chunk of her small life in this bed. Stripping the wood and putting on a high sheen, it made me glad to make her a special place, a place all her own.

As parents, we spend so much time focusing on the waking hours with our children, teaching, playing, instructing, trying to form memories and shape new people. But then you turn out the lights and let them go each night, handing them over to the “death of each day’s life.” And you realize that this is a time that shapes them equally — those quiet moments in the dark, when they are alone with their thoughts and the new longings and joys and memories that flicker behind their heavy lids.

More details over at the photo page today.